As we get older and our bodies take longer to heal, things start to catch up with us. Vision gets a little blurry and information is a little slower to call up in our minds. Some of us like myself, have physical aches from either accidents or repetitive stress injury caused by work or hobbies.

I have played guitar for most of my life. Years of a guitar strap holding a guitar have given me some pain in my left shoulder. The pain was so bad recently that I could not lift my arm past about halfway without searing pain. The pain was becoming constant as well, no matter how I held my arm or rested it.  I feared a rotator cuff injury.

Over the years I have looked for information online to relieve these pains. One quick realization I found was stretching. Simple yoga and stretches do wonder for back, arm and shoulder pain. It took a while, but I can now touch my toes after years of not being able to. This simple stretch provides a lot of relief to me. Another instant pain relief exercise was the pendulum exercise that can be found at mountnittany.org.  I do this exercise whenever I have arm pain.

Neither of these, however, were providing me any kind of pain relief from my most recent shoulder pain.  I would classify it as classic rotator cuff pain:  Aching shoulder pain,  poor sleep from lying on the affected shoulder, arm weakness and it was hard and painful to lift my arm or move it behind my back.  I recently took a vacation where I was away from my guitar and the physical demands of my work for a week.  The pain never got any better and I had resigned myself to having to go get it looked at by a specialist.

Rotator Cuff Pain Relief In An Instant

I was in so much pain one day I spent a ton of time searching the internet for some kind of release when I ran across Dr Loren Fishman’s discoveries on yoga and shoulder pain.  He basically got some relief for his own rotator cuff injury by doing a handstand.  Not all of us can do a handstand obviously and there are stretches that can mimic what’s going on during a handstand.  I found a video that teaches one of these stretches and tried it out.  Instant relief of pain.  Let me say that again:  Instant relief from the pain.

Here’s a link to the page on massagelibrary.com that I found so helpful.  There is a video that shows the technique and a downloadable, printable pdf of the exercise.